Engage & Empower Literacy Learners

With Author and Teacher Penny Kittle

Moving students beyond compliant reading and writing and into engaged reading and writing takes focused planning. How can we create a volume of practice that improves reading, writing, speaking and listening? We will study a balance of opportunities for students to demonstrate independence and increased proficiency across a lesson, a unit, and a year.
We will examine classroom structures that place volume, choice, modeling, and feedback at the center of our instruction. Participants will work with other educators to:

* consider the balance of independent reading, book clubs, and core texts over the course of a year
* consider the balance of writing discourses and opportunities for students to demonstrate agency and independence
* collect engaging seeds for writers’ notebooks
* practice modeling revision moves that improve a text
* plan book clubs centered on essential questions and select books across a range of complexity
* invite students to generate thinking in response to their reading
* create opportunities for digital composition across the school year
* design practices to improve reading fluency, poetry performance, and TED-talk style presentations
* find sentences, passages, and whole texts that will mentor our students in specific writing craft and editing moves across genres
* design assessments that ask students to cite evidence of their learning